By WILLIAM ARNOLD, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, December 19, 2002

Back in 1999, so the story goes, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman was hired to adapt "The Orchid Thief," a non-fiction book about New Yorker writer Susan Orlean's voyage of self-discovery as she journalistically followed the saga of a fanatical Florida orchid breeder.

But the task absolutely stumped him, and, as he grew ever more desperately frustrated and blocked, he finally got the idea of writing himself into the script and making his own creative struggle the focus of a wildly farcical and heavily fictionalized version of the story.

The result, "Adaptation," is an occasionally brilliant, sporadically hilarious, inside-filmmaking burlesque very much in the tradition of Kaufman and director Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich," and a movie that comes excitingly close to being some kind of masterpiece of surrealism.

Kaufman presents himself (Nicolas Cage) as a nervous, de- bilitatingly insecure, Woody Allen-ish intellectual who is a complete washout with women, and a square wheel totally incapable of supply- ing the Hollywood movie machine with the kind of formula scripts it wants.

But he has a twin brother (also Cage) who is everything he is not: comfortable in a crowd, facile with women and, on his first time at bat, quite capable of dashing off an action script of incomparable dumbness that instantly makes him a screen- writing rage.

As Kaufman gets more and more stumped on his adaptation -- and sexually fixated on Orlean (Meryl Streep) -- his solution is to get his brother's help in turning her sensitive story into a break-neck thriller loaded with car chases, shootouts, sexual obsession and murder.

In the process, fact and fantasy blur in Kaufman's and our minds -- and in both the movie and the movie-within-the-movie -- until it becomes impossible to sort out one from the other; and, perhaps consequently, the movie never finds a satisfying way of resolving itself.

As screenwriting guru Bob McKee (Brian Cox), whose famous theories of formula script-writing are both ridiculed and honored by Kaufman within the movie in an even-handed way, might say: the script just never quite licks its third-act problems.

There's also something slightly off-putting about the whole premise: the self-promotional idea of Kaufman making himself the hero of someone else's story. The line between an outrageous creative innovation and a self-serving cheap shot can be very narrow indeed.

But as crazy as it is, and it gets crazier as it moves along, there's something profound about the movie and the manner in which it deconstructs the screenwriting process in its hero's mind while lambasting the pretensions of fast-buck Hollywood.

In its own clever way, Kaufman's script also manages to convey the essence of Orlean's book -- the rediscovery of her own dormant passion -- and enhance it with a whole new subtext that metaphorically plays the idea of a movie adaptation off the adaptive ability of the orchid.

And director Jonze milks the concept for all it's worth, goosing the hilarity with such goofy asides as a fast-forward geological history of Hollywood, and bringing off, with breathtaking insight, a cast of contemporary Hollywood characters worthy of a Russian novel.

For three-fourths of its journey, "Adaptation" is, for my money, the movie of the year: an incredibly audacious and original exercise that challenges the conventions of moviemaking and stretches the boundaries of fiction -- almost, but not quite, to the breaking point.